The “effete” 1996 role Morgan Freeman called his first romantic lead: “I was not homosexual”
Even though the entire point of being a good actor is to disappear into as many different types of characters as possible, there are certain names that audiences and studio executives can’t or won’t buy as a romantic lead, and Morgan Freeman is one of them.
While the veteran has played plenty of guys with wives, a divorcee or two, and the odd widower, he’s never been cast as a single fella who meets the love of his life over the course of a feature-length narrative, and it’s something he was increasingly aware of as he got older.
As mentioned, there are some stars you either couldn’t or wouldn’t want to see in a rom-com. Would anybody be interested in the slightest in a Vin Diesel meet-cute? Hopefully not. If Christian Bale did it, it would arguably be the most daring thing he’s ever done, but it’s not a genre he’s keen on ever trying.
Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn’t mind at all if he were offered a romantic gig, though, but those scripts have never made their way onto his desk, so it hasn’t happened. Freeman would have liked to join the club, but it wasn’t until 2012’s The Magic of Belle Isle that he engaged in his first real onscreen romance, and even, it was far from conventional.
Understandably, that left him clutching at straws to try to think if he’d ever played anything even remotely approaching a romantic lead before then, and since his career started off back in the early 1960s, it’s pretty damning that the only one he could think of wasn’t really a romantic lead at all.
“You can count them all on one hand, with two or three fingers missing,” he sighed. “Of the roles that have been offered to me and that I’ve accepted, none of them have been particularly romantic.” With that in mind, the first thing that popped into his head, or the only thing, to be honest, was a 1996 period drama.
“One movie I did, I was rather effete, because I worked for this madam, and I was her sort of factotum,” he recalled, referring to 1996’s Moll Flanders, where his character, Hibble, becomes the charge of a young girl, and regales her with the story of her mother, Robin Wright’s title character, who worked in a London brothel.
“I took care of the ladies in this brothel; I was pretty much one of the girls, but fully male,” Freeman explained, before adding a needless addendum. “And I was not homosexual.” Thanks for pointing that out, Morgan, and you couldn’t even really call Hibble a romantic lead anyway, seeing as the relationship wasn’t a typical romance, either, since he noted that “Robin Wright wasn’t my love interest, but I did take her under my wing.”
If that’s the best he could muster from his memory banks, a mid-90s literary adaptation where he played the mentor to a prostitute, it just goes to show how much Freeman needed The Magic of Belle Isle to finally tick that romantic box from his list after four decades of barely having any scraps to feed on.
